The Wrong Kind of Compatible by Drew Kerrigan

Data analyst Cassie Howard may be brilliant (and, okay, a little awkward), but she’s worked hard to get where she is. She definitely doesn’t need some sexy new analyst coming in and taking credit for her work. Or the inappropriate thoughts that keep popping out of her mouth she’d rather he not hear.
For undercover FBI agent Drew Kerrigan, computers have always made more sense than people, but he’d better develop some slick social skills in a hurry if he’s going to win over the too-tantalizing-for-his-sanity Cassie. Hacking their systems was easy. Now he’s just got to hack the one person in the company most likely to see through his ruse…

Cassie Howard is Drew Kerrigan’s mark and for him, going undercover—a rare privilege for a hacker like him—is probably one of the hardest things he’s ever done when the attraction at every turn, threatens to make him forget his mission. Compatibility (physical or otherwise) is clearly out of the question when Drew insinuates himself in her work and her personal life, but his admiration of Cassie poses a huge conflict when the case he’s working on seems to point to Cassie’s complicity in the crime he’s investigating.

I liked that Kadie Scott made both protagonists nerdy and socially-awkward in their own ways, with unintended innuendoes that they both say and realise it too late. That’s rom-com strategy right there and some parts were sort of enjoyable, particularly when Cassie and Drew had to work together, all the while second-guessing themselves and each other. The hot-cold interactions between them however, intended to build tension, got a little tired for me when it dragged on.

There are also unfortunately, characters who many other people like but who rub you the wrong way, and Cassie was that for me. I found her harder to like than Drew, who seemed some what more ‘earnest’ in his dealings with her. I understand her insecurities about being the smart but unlucky-in-love girl to the extent where her achievements are everything to her, but I think I would have liked her better at the beginning had she not been too defensively territorial and too passively aggressive about it with a runaway mouth that made me wince more than it was funny. So much about her was overwrought (which is to some extent, understandable, given her family of overachievers) and her suspicion of everything Drew was doing got annoying after a while as she took out her prickly issues on him then acted like a stick in the mud about it.

For some reason, ‘The Wrong Kind of Compatible’ was a difficult read for me—it took me days to go through the pages when I normally would breeze through light-hearted rom-com books in an afternoon. Geek-type reads are usually a guilty pleasure but clearly, my personal preferences are showing up and I couldn’t find much common ground with the heroine, let alone the couple in question.